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Miles of words and Mel Gibson

© Sandra Linville

Mel Gibson usually tracks down bad guys in his movie roles. In a potential new role, he'll track down words as James Murray, the editor of the first Oxford English Dictionary.

Hollywood and the story of putting together a 19th century dictionary are an unlikely combination. However, Simon Winchester's book, The Professor and the Madman, published by HarperCollins, offers all the elements of riveting drama.

Gibson's reputed interest in history and dictionaries drew him to the project. His Icon production company has teamed with Seaside, a production company co-owned by Luc Besson, a noted French film director, to bring Winchester's book to the screen.

The Professor and the Madman chronicles the unlikely friendship between a scholar and an inmate at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, the painstaking achievement of compiling the Oxford English Dictionary, the changing mores of dealing with insanity, the mind-numbing savagery of the Civil War, and the way a man disconnected from life's reality can make a place for himself in the world.

William Minor, the "madman" of the story, was born in Ceylon to a Congregationalist couple from New Haven, Connecticut. He trained as a physician at Yale University and was a member of the Union Army during the American Civil War's bloodiest days. In a telling remark, Winchester states: "Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any conflict between men before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men - and yet at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. It was fought with the mortar and the minié ball, but not yet quite with anesthesia or with sulphanomides and penicillin. The common soldier was thus in a poorer position than at any time before. He could be monstrously ill treated by all the new weaponry, and yet only moderately well treated with all the old medicine."

The situation's futility could have easily overwhelmed a doctor. Whether this experience, in addition to a genetic predisposition, fractured Minor's sense of self is open to speculation. Throughout the book, Winchester explores the possible reasons for the madness which leads to Minor murdering a man in England and then brutally mutilating himself while at Broadmoor.

However, his madness didn't always overwhelm his keen intellect. And, so the story leads to how Minor became one of the two most important volunteer contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary and how his friendship with James Murray, the "professor," began.

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